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RocketAcademy writes “Spaceweather.com reports an explosion on Jupiter, which was detected by two amateur astronomers. According to Spaceweather.com, the event occurred at 11:35 Universal Time on September 10. Dan Peterson of Racine, Wisconsin, observing through a 12-inch Meade telescope, observed a white flash lasting for 1.5-2 seconds. George Hall of Dallas, Texas was capturing a video of Jupiter at the time, which also captured the event. It’s believed that the explosion was due to a comet or small asteroid collision. Similar events were observed in the past, in June and August 2010.”

syngularyx writes “There is a risk of a radioactive leak after an explosion in an oven Monday at the Marcoule nuclear site near the city of Nimes in the south of France. From the article: ‘One person was killed and three were injured in the explosion, following a fire in a storage site for radioactive waste, Le Figaro newspaper said. It is a major site involved with the decommissioning of nuclear facilities. emergency services said.’”

syngularyx writes “An explosion took place in an oven Monday at the Marcoule nuclear site near the city of Nimes in the south of France. From the article: ‘One person was killed and three were injured in the explosion, following a fire in a storage site for radioactive waste, Le Figaro newspaper said. It is a major site involved with the decommissioning of nuclear facilities. emergency services said.’”Update: 09/12 16:20 GMT by S : Changed headline and summary to reflect that there seems to be no risk of a leak.

chill sends this quote from a news release by the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory: “A supernova discovered yesterday is closer to Earth — approximately 21 million light-years away—than any other of its kind in a generation. Astronomers believe they caught the supernova within hours of its explosion, a rare feat made possible with a specialized survey telescope and state-of-the-art computational tools. ‘We caught this supernova very soon after explosion. PTF 11kly is getting brighter by the minute. It’s already 20 times brighter than it was yesterday,’ said Peter Nugent, the senior scientist at Berkeley Lab who first spotted the supernova. … the supernova is still getting brighter, and might even be visible with good binoculars in ten days’ time, appearing brighter than any other supernova of its type in the last 30 years.”

Endoflow2010 sends word of an enormous eruption that occurred on the Sun this morning. Phil Plait describes it thus: “What you’re seeing here is a solar flare (an enormous explosion of pent-up magnetic energy) coupled with a prominence (a physical eruption of gas from the surface). This event blasted something like a billion tons of material away from the Sun. Note the size of it, too: while it started from a small region on the Sun’s surface, it quickly expanded into a plume easily as big as the Sun itself! I’d estimate its size at well over a million kilometers across.” The attached video is well worth watching.

What appears to be a fire or explosion engulfed one of the buildings at the Foxconn Factory in Chengdu, China. There are no reports of casualties although the damage does look severe and quite thorough. MICGadget reported that “10 fire engines, ambulances and 10 police cars” arrived on the scene. Reports state that a few floors in Building A5 (apparently part of the iPad 2 production line) were affected and that the explosion was caused by light dust igniting in one of the manufacturing rooms.

It’s time for the much-awaited part two of our sit down with Internet big-thinkers Reid Hoffman and Tim O’Reilly. We invited the two in the studio last week to talk about what Hoffman has called “Web 3.0″– the use of an explosion of data being collected about our real lives online.

Last week, we talked about the undeniably scary aspects of Web 3.0– data and privacy and how we can trust companies or governments in a Web 3.0-era. This week, we talk about the good things: The realm of innovation that all this data opens up. From self-driving cars to sustainable mega-cities, in this segment Hoffman and O’Reilly give us their Web 3.0 wish list.